Solar return chart calculator: your year ahead

Every year the Sun travels once around the zodiac and comes back to the exact degree it held at your birth. That moment is your solar return, and the chart cast for it is read as a portrait of the year that runs until your next birthday. It is the same idea as the Saturn return, applied to the planet that sets the calendar.

The return chart is a full chart: Ascendant, Midheaven, houses and every planet, all for one minute. Your natal Sun sits at the same degree in it by definition; everything else is new, which is why astrologers read the return alongside your birth chart rather than instead of it.

The Sun needs about 365.24 days to come back to the same degree, while the calendar has 365 days, or 366 in a leap year. So the return arrives roughly six hours later each year and jumps back after every February 29. It often falls on the birthday itself, but it can land on the day before or after, especially for people born near midnight.

That is also why a return has a time, not just a date. The year selector above shows last year's return, this year's and the next two, each to the minute.

The planets have the same signs and degrees from anywhere on Earth, but the Ascendant, the Midheaven and the houses depend on where the chart is cast. The usual practice is to cast the return for the place where you are at the moment it happens, so the calculator starts with your birthplace and lets you choose any other city.

Moving the place shifts the angles and can carry planets into other houses. Some people choose where to spend a birthday for exactly this reason; the calculator shows what changes before you book anything. Because the return is cast for a single minute, moving the chosen place by even a few hundred kilometers can change the Ascendant by a degree or more, so compare the angles of every city you are weighing.

Tradition starts with the return Ascendant, read as the tone of the year and how you meet it, and with the house the Sun falls in, read as the area where the year's attention gathers. The Moon's sign and house describe what you will need to feel settled, and planets close to the angles are taken as the year's loudest themes.

A return is read for one year only. It is not a forecast of events: it shows which parts of the chart are emphasized, and how much weight to give that is yours to decide. For the day-to-day movement within the year, the transit chart shows today's planets against your birth chart.

Your birth date, time and place are turned into Universal Time with the historical time zone rules of that place. Our engine computes the Sun's apparent geocentric longitude at that instant from the VSOP87 theory, corrected for light time, aberration and nutation, in the tropical zodiac. For the chosen year it then searches the days around your birthday and narrows the crossing down to the second. In our tests against NASA JPL's Horizons ephemeris, the return instants agree to within a few seconds; the accuracy page shows how the engine compares.

Everything is calculated in your browser. To show the first line of today's reading, your birth details are sent once to our server, which does not store them; only the place search sends the name you type to Photon, the OpenStreetMap geocoder. The calculator is free and needs no account.